Two things:
1) I had a thought after class about the utopian eradication of disciplinary boundaries that seems to be one possibility among many for realizing Women's Studies's potential. It seems like there are two motivations for this vision - to eliminated the topical restrictions demanded by institutional exigencies like payroll and territorialism (e.g. so that poli sci profs could teach courses in Women's Studies and vice versa), and to give people the opportunity to become more well-rounded (e.g. so that people in Cell Biology wouldn't be so ignorant of gender issues; see Warhol). I agree that it would be nice to have limitless exchangeability between departments for the purposes of widening course availability and increasing opportunities for people to expand their world views, but it seems like eradicating the disciplines altogether would be a bad things because it would eliminate a lot of the specialization that makes higher education possible. It's easier to think this in terms of the natural sciences, but newer disciplines like ecology probably wouldn't be possible without thousands of highly specialized biologists and chemists doing the legwork that allows ecologists to synthesize lots of specialized information into a bigger picture about biological systems. A similar thing seems to occur in Women's Studies, where students read English, sociology, anthropology, poli sci and philosophy (etc.) texts, each of which depends on the legwork of hundreds or thousands of highly specialized scholars whose findings have provided the basis for the knowledge that we're synthesizing into a bigger picture. If every student in the intedisciplinary university got a generalized education, how would we create a corpus of knowledge with any kind of depth?
That brings me to 2) I noticed in Cervenak, et al., that certain things were rejected in their class for being "empty intellectualism or Eurocentric elitism," (which is a reflex that doesn't seem altogether uncommon in Women's Studies). First of all, how is this better than natural scientists rejecting leftist academia for being "fluff," and second, how are attitudes like this conducive to interdisciplinarity? Shouldn't we read and listen to the ideas before deciding to accept or reject them, rather than doing so on the basis of the institution that (may have) produced them?
1) I had a thought after class about the utopian eradication of disciplinary boundaries that seems to be one possibility among many for realizing Women's Studies's potential. It seems like there are two motivations for this vision - to eliminated the topical restrictions demanded by institutional exigencies like payroll and territorialism (e.g. so that poli sci profs could teach courses in Women's Studies and vice versa), and to give people the opportunity to become more well-rounded (e.g. so that people in Cell Biology wouldn't be so ignorant of gender issues; see Warhol). I agree that it would be nice to have limitless exchangeability between departments for the purposes of widening course availability and increasing opportunities for people to expand their world views, but it seems like eradicating the disciplines altogether would be a bad things because it would eliminate a lot of the specialization that makes higher education possible. It's easier to think this in terms of the natural sciences, but newer disciplines like ecology probably wouldn't be possible without thousands of highly specialized biologists and chemists doing the legwork that allows ecologists to synthesize lots of specialized information into a bigger picture about biological systems. A similar thing seems to occur in Women's Studies, where students read English, sociology, anthropology, poli sci and philosophy (etc.) texts, each of which depends on the legwork of hundreds or thousands of highly specialized scholars whose findings have provided the basis for the knowledge that we're synthesizing into a bigger picture. If every student in the intedisciplinary university got a generalized education, how would we create a corpus of knowledge with any kind of depth?
That brings me to 2) I noticed in Cervenak, et al., that certain things were rejected in their class for being "empty intellectualism or Eurocentric elitism," (which is a reflex that doesn't seem altogether uncommon in Women's Studies). First of all, how is this better than natural scientists rejecting leftist academia for being "fluff," and second, how are attitudes like this conducive to interdisciplinarity? Shouldn't we read and listen to the ideas before deciding to accept or reject them, rather than doing so on the basis of the institution that (may have) produced them?
posted by willko5 at
2:01 PM
2 Comments:
In response to your first point: Warhol's utopian leanings were quite persuasive in the context of her university's difficult situation. Her cunning, counterintuitive strategy seemed like the best possible response to her circumstances. However, while I'm all for feminist studies' percolation throughout broader academic institutions, its well-being in traditional disciplines (even if these are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary) seems contingent upon individual faculty members' political outlooks. Although I'm currently taking a graduate English course with a prof who is very open to feminist theory, and includes a fair bit of it on his syllabus (we're even going to the Vancouver Art Gallery's WACK! exhibition as a class), I had the misfortune (or perhaps rather eye-opening experience) of taking a Russian History course in my undergrad with a prof who was not only indifferent to any women-centred content in the syllabus, but seemed vaguely hostile towards my deviation from the set list of available essay topics to pursue a project on women's movements in revolutionary Russia. Did I mention that he also had a penchant for referring to nation-states with feminine pronouns? Yeah...
But anyhow, even the most feminist-friendy non-Women's Studies profs don't usually centre their courses entirely around women's or gender studies material. It seems useful to preserve a necessarily complicated, intellectually interdisciplinary, Women's Studies department wherever possible so that feminist work can stand as the legitimate centre of inquiry. There's certainly enough of it to warrant this focus.
On to your second point:
The "anti-intellectualism" reflex you identified in the Cervenak et al. article has irked me whenever I've come across it all semester (or throughout my academic career). I can certainly understand how dense language and theoretical allusions can seem impenetrable and frustrating, and I share such authors' qualms about how apparently elitist work gets elevated above other purportedly "less rigorous" or "less theoretical" scholarship. Despite one's particular attraction or repulsion towards this kind of work, however, I really think that individual texts by individual authors need to be evaluated for their political/theoretical merit, rather than lead to a sweeping dismissal of poststructuralist or postmodernist feminism proper. I suspect that the move you describe is very damaging to an interdisciplinary Women's Studies, since academics or grad students working from more of a humanities rather than social sciences perspective may be more likely to have their work branded as indulgent, elitist, or "merely cultural." (In the feminist research colloquium course that I mentioned in class, the political science-trained instructor looked at me after I described my proposed MA work on retro imagery in feminist visual culture, and said in a voice that had a clear "let's not kid ourselves" tone: "but your project's not really political, is it?" I was too flustered to respond, but received a sympathy email from a fellow classmate about the "apolitical" accusation.) Gunew touches upon the damaging consequences of the drive for instrumentality in feminist scholarship around pages 52-53 of her essay, and Robyn Wiegman provides an incisive analysis of the tortured relationship between Women's Studies and institutionalization in her article "Academic Feminism Against Itself" in the Summer 2002 issue of the NWSA Journal.
After posting my comment, I just wanted to clarify for everyone that I'm not criticizing Cervenak, et al. In fact, it seems like we're making more or less the same argument.
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